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Muscle building is about your workout. The consistency, intensity, workout design and your ability to push past your previous best. Building muscle is largely about your genetics and working within your genetic boundaries. In short, the genetic environment inside your body is the biggest factor that controls your muscle building potential along with your workouts.
Fat loss is about nutrition and handling your food and eating environment outside of your body. Social factors like co-workers, family, spouse, school, holidays and special occasions, the country and city you live in all make a big difference for how your fat loss success goes. The way we eat and the temptation to overeat is a constant battle for many people in modern western societies.
We cover both of these topics in this podcast and show how confusing one for the other can ruin both your muscle building and fat loss results.
Getting them both on target will get you results much faster.
John
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{ 11 comments }
So what about the idea that in order to gain strength and muscle mass, you should skip out on cardio? If under conventional ideas you need extra calories to gain muscle, then cardio will hurt you? I’ve been following that and I think it would be great if I could run and play basketball as much as I want while gaining strength and muscle.
Jorge,
You can definitely do both. Go ahead and play basketball and do whatever else you want as far as ‘cardio’ style work or sports are concerned.
That old mentality is a mis-interpretation of the research. Or more accurately stated, a mis-application of the research.
At the absolute extremes of strength or long distance endurance, yes you wouldn’t want to do too much of the opposite type of work.
But that would only apply for an olympic level weight lifter or distance runner who is trying to add a couple pounds to a world record lift or shave a few seconds off of a run.
For the average person you can most certainly gain impressive muscle mass and strength and be in great cardio condition and do all of the running and sports you like.
I hope that clears it up for you.
John
so metabolism as most people know it doesn’t exist, I had a feeling you couldn’t break it. cool stuff
Wow, thanks for clearing that up John! So glad I know that now. I just realized how much ground breaking info is in this one podcast, you guys tore apart so many myths and misconceptions. I wanna tell people that I don’t need to overeat to gain muscle, but they probably won’t believe it coming from a skinny guy. Can you point to some links or studies that prove this?
Jorge,
Your best resource for understanding this is Brad Pilon’s book “How Much Protein”
http://www.truthaboutprotein.com
it’ll explain everything you need to know. I helped Brad research and edit this book so I know it’s got what you’re looking for.
John
Thanks for this! I have been having problems with building up my muscles lately, and this would be a lot of help.
Guys – I’ve started listening to those podcasts and am enjoying them immenseley. In fact, listening to your discussion, I think some of the old spark that made me interested in fitness back in 2002 came back. Awesome. I am entertained as well as educated. I will try to get more people to follow your blog.
On the topic of bulking and muscle – I wrote this article some time ago trying to preach the same thing.
http://relativestrengthadvantage.com/gaining-muscle-by-stuffing-yourself-like-a-pig-is-a-stupid-idea/
Take care,
Yavor
This is a revelation! This podcast and the rest of the information on this site is literally going to change my life. Do you know how much stress I was dealing with trying to organize my diet in order to be able to eat the “clean” 3,000-4,000 calories a day that, according bodybuilding dogma, I was supposed to eat in order to gain lean muscle and prevent me from turning into Kate Moss? I have done a “bulk diet” for nearly two years and while my body fat has gone up noticeably (I’m 6’1” and weigh around 215), I have forutunately decided to stop the nonsense and listen to your advice before my waist takes on even more ridiculous proportions (right now it’s 37”). I”m really excited because discipline is definitely not something I lack and, for me, simply dropping my calories is going to be cake (not real cake). I have lost sleep at night stressing about how in the hell I was going to maintain my diet, but this is like a magic bullet. I guess the other thing that just struck me about all of this is how right on the mark Stuart Mcrobert was with his projected measurements for a drug-free bodybuilder. Also, one question: For soemone who is 6’1” and 215 (I still have visible abs), how many calories would be too low? In your podcast I know you were referring to starvation mode and was just wondering what level of caloric intake would be approaching that? I’m not planning on being ridiculous, but knowing the extremes seems like useful information.
Reza,
You could easily go as low as 1500 per day for an extended period of time and be just fine.
JB
so is your bmr as low as you can go to build muscle and loose weight
So you are saying you “can’t” actually ADD muscle, you can only “inflate” what you have, which means the only reason it is heavier and visually bigger is because of more blood/water/glucose content due to the extra stress due to workouts? Is that right?
What about the whole “tear the muscles down and then rest so they repair and become THICKER”? Isn’t that what happens? Isn’t the THICKER repair process an ADDITION of muscle fiber?
Thanks for the info!
-Eric
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